Perry Anderson on "Russia’s Managed Democracy"

Perry Anderson, prominent left wing social critic and historian at UCLA, has written an insightful analysis of Putin’s Russia for the London Review of Books.I recently translated an interview Anderson gave to Kommersant, and in the LRB piece he elaborates on some of the ideas he presented there.I highly recommend reading it.It’s quite lucid and thick.Not to mention the guy can just flat out write.Here is an opening excerpt:

Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries – Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an impotent ombudsman – had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier. Around the edges of the mortuary chamber, garlands from the media that attacked her while she was alive stood thick alongside wreaths from her children and friends, the satisfied leaf to leaf with the bereaved. Filing past them and out into the cemetery beyond, virtually no one spoke. Some were in tears. People dispersed in the drizzle as quietly as they came.

The authorities had gone to some lengths to divert Anna Politkovskaya’s funeral from the obvious venue of the Vagankovskoe, where Sakharov is buried, to a dreary precinct on the outskirts that few Muscovites can locate on a map. But how necessary was the precaution? The number of mourners who got to the Troekurovskoe was not large, perhaps a thousand or so, and the mood of the occasion was more sadness than anger. A middle-aged woman, bringing groceries home from the supermarket, shot at point-blank range in an elevator, Politkovskaya was killed for her courage in reporting the continuing butchery in Chechnya. An attempt to poison her had narrowly failed two years earlier. She had another article in press on the atrocities of the Kadyrov clan that now runs the country for the Kremlin, as she was eliminated. She lived and died a fighter. But of any powerful protest at her death, it is difficult to speak. She was buried with resignation, not fury or revolt.

In Ukraine, the discovery of the decapitated body of a journalist who had investigated official corruption, Georgi Gongadze, was sufficient outrage to shake the regime, which was brought down soon afterwards. Politkovskaya was a figure of another magnitude. A better historical comparison might be with the murder of Matteotti by Mussolini in 1924. In Russian circumstances, her moral stature as an opponent of arbitrary power was scarcely less than that of the Socialist deputy. But there the resemblance ends. The Matteotti Affair caused an outcry that nearly toppled Mussolini. Politkovskaya was killed with scarcely a ripple in public opinion. Her death, the official media explained, was either an unfathomable mystery, or the work of enemies of the government vainly attempting to discredit it. The president remarked she was a nobody whose death was the only news value in her life.

It is tempting, but would be a mistake, to see in that casual dismissal no more than the ordinary arrogance of power. All governments deny their crimes, and most are understanding of each other’s lies about them. Bush and Blair, with still more blood on their hands – in all probability, that of over half a million Iraqis – observe these precepts as automatically as Putin. But there is a difference that sets Putin apart from his fellow rulers in the G8, indeed from virtually any government in the world. On the evidence of comparative opinion polls, he is the most popular national leader alive today. Since he came to power six years ago, he has enjoyed the continuous support of over 70 per cent of his people, a record no other contemporary politician begins to approach. For comparison, Chirac now has an approval rating of 38 per cent, Bush of 36 per cent, Blair of 30 per cent.

Related

You Might also like

Just when you though anarchist studies was a dead subject, Mark Leier, the director of the Centre for Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University in Canada has published a new biography of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. You can read Walter Moss’ review of the book in the Moscow Times. It sounds like a good read, though sadly Leier doesn’t take advantage of the voluminous amount of Russian sources.

I’ve always found Bakunin an attractive figure. Alexander Herzen paints a wonderful picture of him in his memoirs My Past and Thoughts. Bakunin’s debates with Marx are a classic moment in revolutionary intellectual history, though when you think of about it, it is wholly unimportant in the big scheme of things. Unfortunately, not everyone is so convinced of its irrelevance to current politics.

About ten years ago I went to an anarchist convention in San Francisco at Golden Gate Park. The main attraction was not only the book fair, but the fact that Jello Biafra was speaking. When I ventured outside the pavilion for a break from the anarchist hubbub, I came upon a lone Spartacist member peddling the League’s newspaper the Workers Vanguard. Not having much exposure to the Sparts at that time, I began talking to him. What followed was a lesson in American radical politics.

While I was talking to the Spart, an anarchist approached and began denouncing the Trotskyist for a number of political historical crimes: betraying Nestor Makhno and being on the wrong side of the Bakunin-Marx debate. The Spart rebutted with similarly silly accusations. There was a good lesson in this comedic moment: both of these fools were completely irrelevant. And how could they not be? One was speaking about a debate that happened in 1848 as if it was yesterday, and the other was selling a newspaper that had little pictures of Lenin and Trotsky inside the front page.

As a postscript, I did subscribe to the Workers’ Vanguard that day. It wasn’t because I found the Spartacist line attractive in any way, but because it was cheap and I was into collecting radical newspapers at the time. The paper never really impressed; it was mostly concerned with resurrecting revolutionary corpses from a bygone time. Though I must say, it did give me a few laughs, especially when a few months later they published three issues revisiting that damn Bakunin-Marx debate.

Robert Amsterdam has alerted readers to a rather amusing section where Myers speaks of Aleksandr Donskoi, the young mayor Arkhangelsk who declared his candidacy for president.Since his declaration, Donskoi has been a victim of harassment, some of which are rumors in the local press that he is gay.The rumors have apparently gotten so bad that he has had to hold press conferences to deflect them as well as charges that he falsified his university diploma and has an interest in “gypsy hypnosis”.According to Myers, at one such conference, Donskoi’s wife Marina, visibly flustered by the tabloid style accusations against her husband, interrupted him and shouted “He’s not gay!He impregnated me.”It appears that however fixed the 2008 Presidential Election might be, it won’t be void of bread and circuses.

Lyndon at Scraps of Moscow has also commented on the Myers’ piece.The text conjured memories of the phrase “Who lost Russia?”First, I should say that it’s funny to think that anyone besides the Russians themselves have any claim of loss over Russia. Alas suffice to say that hubris has never quelled a pundit’s gumption. Lyndon provides an excellent genealogy of the question “Who Lost Russia?”, locating its origins in an 1998 article by premier American nationalist Pat Buchanan.Who would have ever guessed Buchanan to be such a sage!Lyndon’s post is a must read not only because of its trip down memory lane but also because in reflecting on that past, he reminds us that “in the end, Yeltsin, because of his move naming Putin acting president just months before the 2000 election, may be remembered as both the midwife of Russian democracy and its executioner.”

The Myers’ article intrigued me for other reasons.I want to put aside the proverbial tales of “there is opposition to Putin” and the very real harassment that Kasyanov, Donskoi, Illarionov, and Kasparov have all faced.I also want to keep silent about the obvious attempts to turn Ivanov and Medvedev into something representing human empathy.These are often told tales and I think Myers does a fine job in retelling them.Instead, I want to focus, or really piece together a notion I think Myers hints at but still requires some culling together.Namely, that Putin’s Russia represents a hybrid of capitalism and authoritarianism facilitated by the practice of patron client politics. The latter characteristic has long historical roots, making it a historical vestige that has been remodeled and reformulated to present elite interests.

Some might argue that there is little difference between what Myers calls the “new imperial Russia” and the “Soviet Union Lite.”Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a revision underway in Russian historiography that sees Soviet Russia as a continuum of Imperial Russia.1917 was less a break, historians argue, than it was a ratcheting up, an acceleration if you will, of Russia’s journey into the modern era.If this argument is taken to its logical conclusion, Russia is on a different path but to an altogether similar end to the West (and the rest of the world); the singular world historical end of capitalism.Thus, Putin is part of long lineage of Russian modernizers: Peter I, Catherine II, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Mikhail Loris-Melikov, Sergei Witte, Piotr Stolypin, Lenin, and Stalin.A similar assumption is hidden in Myers text.After all, what else could provide the impulse to declare that Putin might be judged as “Russia’s George Washington?”However much each of the listed figures combined personal power with state power, violence and repression with state building, each, when stripped of moral trappings and sentimental analysis, was a Russian modernizer.The odds of Putin eschewing “the possibility of retaining personal power [ to overrule] a young country’s laws and democratic principles” however moribund and hollow those laws and principles may be, places him squarely in that lineage.

Yet the path to modernity is not a smooth one nor is it so teleological.Modernity is filled with contradictions, and despite Marx’s claim that capital makes “all that is solid melt into air,” one can find in his more dialectical moments the articulation of a divergent and rockier path.Namely, where capital only ideally overcomes its barriers (i.e. culture, tradition, religion, identity, and history), “it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.”Thus, the vestiges of the past are never really past, but only soldered to the crevices of modernity.The end product is not a smooth capitalist system with all its idealized democratic trappings, but one that is a hybrid where the vestiges of the past are fused or braided with the present.

Present day Russia is one such example of this braiding.On the hand, Russia exemplifies the antithesis of what we are told is a modern capitalist democracy.It has democracy in form but not in content.Its vertical power structures outweigh the horizontal.Civil society, which is often touted (or should I say fetishized) as part and parcel to capitalist democracy, is either subordinated to the state or where there it has autonomy is politically irrelevant.The rule of law is better stated as the law of rule.On the other hand, when you look at Russia in regard to economics it has a free market, private property, and is bound to the globalized economy.And despite all of the charges of Putin’s authoritarianism and economic corporatism, privatization of small industry, land, and property has flourished under his tenure.As Myers states, “Kremlin Inc. has become the name for the hybrid system Putin created: capitalism with an authoritarian face.”

Many have wondered why capitalist Russia did not produce a democratic system similar to the European or the Anglo-American model.Forget the fact that the only states that have these models are the Europeans (which is more properly a conglomerate of particular models all under the conceptual umbrella of parliamentarian democracy) and the British, the Americans and their vassals (despite the fact that while they are always mentioned in tandem, really have very different systems).One can throw in Israel and Japan as shining examples of capitalist democracies outside of the Euro-Anglo-American sphere, but still their presence does not make historical law.

Conceptual misnomers, however, have not stopped experts from trying to explain Russia “failure”.They have pointed to Russia’s authoritarianism, unshakable patriarchy, its Asiatic culture and mentality, and its traditional culture as explanations.Others have suggested that its tragic history and perpetual instability are the midwives of authoritarianism. Experts have dug deep into the bedrock of history and have highlighted Ivan IV as an origin; others only scraped the surface of the recent past and put the blame squarely on Bolshevism.Whether primordial or constructed, part of the long dur?e or the quick shifts of modernization, it is argued there is something in Russian society that prevents them from becoming like us.Perhaps the problem is that we, that is, those who hold the “West” (yes, the scare quotes are necessary) up as some sort of archetype of human society, should first strip ourselves of conceptual narcissism before understanding them.

Myers’ article might provide some answers to Russia’s present character.It is often said that Russia’s leaders can aptly claim that “L’Etat c’est moi.” But if you look carefully at Russian history and present Russian politics, the “I” in the state might better represent a tightly bound elite rather than one all-powerful individual.The fact that all societies produce elites is a sociological fact; as is the idea that every society produces elites in their own particular way.For Russia, elites are made and reproduced through patron client networks, where a “manager” is placed at the center to adjudicate conflict and divisions between elite clans.There have been times when the “manager” has had to smash networks that threatened his power (whether real or perceived).Ivan IV’s move against the boyars was one example, as was Stalin’s move against the Old Bolsheviks.Putin’s campaign against oligarchs like Berezovsky and Khodorokovsky can been seen in a similar light.

I have argued before that Putin is also such a manager. But you can see this in Myers’ article with statements like,

The search for his replacement has started to look less like a political campaign and more like a boardroom struggle to select a new C.E.O. As at most corporations, the process is out of the public eye, the result presented to shareholders as a fait accompli. And like most executives, Putin is susceptible to choosing someone most like himself. (Emphasis added.)

And,

All [of the possible candidates for president] have been mentioned as possible successors to Putin, not because they have said anything or even distinguished themselves in any particular way but because they are close to Putin. All, with the exception of Sobyanin, are old friends and allies from his hometown, then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. No one knows for sure who might emerge as a candidate, because Putin himself will decide, and he has given no indication yet of his final choice. What is certain is that whomever he selects will become the next president of Russia. (Emphasis added).

And,

Ivanov is portrayed as a hard-liner, part of the clan of Putin aides known as the siloviki, or people of power. Medvedev is the (comparatively) liberal, democratic reformer, from the clan representing the modernizing businessmen. Both are oversimplifications, since their singular positions are entirely dependent on their close, personal relations with and loyalty to Putin, who is unquestionably in charge. (Emphasis added.)

Myers is clear that he thinks elites are “dependent” on Putin for their positions, and that is true up to a point.One might also ask: How much is Putin, not to mention his successor, dependent on them for his?

These patron client networks, where the patron is in indisputable charge but that indisputability is given by the client, is a reciprocal relationship that forms the binds of an elite.Much has been made of the fact that Putin has surrounded himself with ex-KGB/FSB types and how this is a reflection of Putin’s inability to shake his spy past.Part of this is certainly true, but such a move is quite logical.First the KGB/FSB produced some of USSR/Russia’s most talented people.Second, the clannish nature of Russian politics is going to make Putin surround himself with people he knows and can trust.Putin hasn’t smashed the oligarchy as much as he created a managed oligarchy.This practice wasn’t called khvostizm or tailism in the 1920s and 1930s for nothing. It is the reality of clan politics that makes Andrei Illarionov’s description of the “succession process as something out of the Middle Ages” quite apt.

In regard to capitalism, Russia is simply a more transparent capitalism, and despite what partisans of capital might say, it fits well in capital’s tendency to concentrate wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.What makes Russia different than say other capitalist states is that the overt practice of clan politics closes many of the avenues that distributes wealth and power among a wider elite class.Thus, the first question a young Russian up and comer might be asked is “who do you know?” rather than “What do you know?”In addition, the fact that Russian capitalism is predicated on patron-client networks makes its flesh and innards no less capitalist.In fact, I would say that in many ways it wears capital’s true face.

Related

Kommersant’s English mirror site has an article with the details about Basayev’s death and autopsy. His body was so mangled by a weapons explosion that forensic experts had to identify the corpse through his hands and feet. Details of the explosion that killed him have been pieced together by representatives of the Interior Ministry and Ingushetian Prosecutor’s Office. They are as follows:

According to the investigation, late Sunday evening, several automobiles – three cars and two KamAZ trucks, one of which was towing the other – came to an unfinished house on the edge of Ekazhevo. There was some movement inside the house for a while, said the very few witnesses investigators were able to find, as people in black uniforms went back and forth between the house and the forest, which began at the edge of the yard and stretched all the way to the border with North Ossetia. They unloaded crates from the trucks and transferred other between cars. Then a powerful explosion took place.

Local police arrived to find the smoking frame of one of the trucks with a thick cable tied to its front bumper and a large pit, on the other side of which was the rear part of a car frame. The other truck stood at a distance of several tens of meters and was relatively undamaged. In the back of the truck were 150 unguided artillery missiles and about 100 cartridges of various calibers. Several dozen barrels from RPG-7 and RPG-26 grenade launchers were scattered within a radius of half a kilometer, as well as unexploded warheads from them and a large number of bullets. Those were the contents of the truck that exploded. Four bodies and four machineguns were also found.

Early Monday morning, about six hours after the blast, FSB agents arrived on the scene. They dismissed the local police and prosecutors and declared that the event had been their special operation. Several hours later they announced that Basaev has been killed.

The material evidence gathered by experts indicates, however, that the militants most likely blew themselves up due to careless handling of explosives. Newly built empty houses were being used by the separatists as warehouses where large shipments of weapons from abroad were received and distributed. Representatives from various groups were dividing a newly received shipment among themselves on Sunday. It is possible that the weapons were to be carried away in the two trucks but, after one of them broke down, the weapons had to be reloaded into a car.

So there you have it. FSB special forces did not have a hand in killing him, though I’m sure they will continue to claim it until their dying end. Rather, Basayev’s death was a result of the “careless handling of explosives.” Not the type of valiant death a “shaheed” would hope for.

I also encourage readers to check out Thomas de Waal’s comment on Basayev in today’s Moscow Times. De Waal met with Basayev once in 1998, and while he claims that the terrorist was no “Islamist” or “politician”, he was a “permanent warrior” and “his fearlessness, cunning, propaganda skills and cruelty made him unique.” In Waal’s view, this makes Basayev irreplaceable. He continues:

Two of his kind do not come around twice in a generation. The bad news is that his removal came many years too late — and not just because many hundreds of people might otherwise be alive. The Russian leadership has eliminated or exiled the moderate wing of the Chechen pro-independence movement, which wanted to negotiate and could have brought alienated Chechens back intosome kind of political process.

Consider the situation of a young twenty-something Chechen male who has been part of the rebel movement for the last decade. He has seen friends and family members die and quite probably has been wounded or tortured by Russian security forces. He has almost no education. If he watches Russian television he will see reports of his comrades being “destroyed” as if they were vermin.

Now this man has no leaders left. What route does he follow? One route is collaboration. The so-called “Kadyrovtsy” who comprise Chechnya’s pro-Moscow security forces aremainly ex-fighters, taking a rest from the hills and earning a decent salary in a new uniform. Their loyalty is entirely provisional and on the day after their leader, Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, is replaced or arrested, there is no knowing what they will do next.

The other road is radical Islam. In the last five years, a network of shadowy jamaats, or Islamic groups, has sprung up across the North Caucasus, from Dagestan to Karachayevo-Cherkessia. Its adherents are anonymous pious young men from marginalized social groups. Not for them the theatrics of Basayev; they will operate like tiny ants gnawing away at the fundamentals of Russian power in the region.

This last point again raises the question of whether Basayev’s death will be a blessing that goes beyond the demise of a ruthless terrorist. Some, like Timur Aliev of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, are reporting how some in Chechnya hope that Basayev’s death will be the beginning of the conflict’s end. Others, like Andrei Smirnov at the Eurasia Daily Monitor, suggest that the militant’s death in no way means the problems in the North Caucauses are solved. Though the reigns of the rebels’ leadership now passes to Doku Umarov, the course he chooses for the movement could engender rivals to his leadership. Thus the movement could further fracture between a young and old guard. Another worry is that now rebel forces in Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, and Ingushetia lack leadership and an iconic hero. While many in Russia might greet the disarray of the Chechen nationalist movement, that chaos will only make any positives that might result from Basayev’s death difficult to achieve.

This difficulty will in part be exacerbated by the utter misanalysis Russia makes of the conflict. As Stephen Blank, another commentator at the Eurasia Daily Monitor, concludes:

Although official Russia likes to attribute the unrest in the Caucasus in general — and in Chechnya in particular — to Wahhabism, in fact the cause of the unrest remains long-standing Russian misrule and oppression. This situation ultimately led to unbridled Islamic terrorism as practiced by Basaev and his like-minded colleagues, but it is doubtful that Kadyrov and his thugs represent a better prospect or that anyone else has a solution to the problems of the North Caucasus. Undoubtedly Putin has won a big battle here, even if inadvertently, and cut down a tall tree of Chechen resistance. But it is unlikely that a people who have fought Russia for more than 200 years will simply accept defeat now or that Russia knows how and will bring about a peace based upon a legitimate order that compels assent rather than fear either in Chechnya or in the North Caucasus.